having rendered inestimable services to their country,
by which they were persecuted or betrayed. Themistocles, Hannibal,
Scipio Africanus, Belisarius, Napoleon, belong to this bright band. It
is not difficult to see that the cause of it is to be found in their
very greatness itself. They were too powerful to be tolerated by their
countrymen: they were too formidable to be endured by their enemies.

It is hard to say whether Hannibal's military capacity appeared most
strongly in strategy, that is, the general direction of a campaign, or
in tactics, that is, the management of troops on the field of battle. In
both he was unrivalled in ancient times. His wonderful ability in
strategy, and in preparing his multifarious forces for the grand
enterprise for which they were destined, appears from the very outset of
his military career. Devoted to the destruction of Rome from his youth
upwards, and steady in the determination to over-throw that inveterate
enemy to his country, he had yet the difficult and apparently hopeless
task of accomplishing this by land warfare, when Carthage had no native
born army in the slightest degree commensurate to its execution. To form
such an army was his first object, and this he accomplished by his
successes in Spain, before the second Punic War began. In the interval
between the first and the second of those dire contests, he was
assiduously employed in conquering, organizing, and disciplining the
forces by which his great object was to be effected; and such was his
capacity, that, notwithstanding the untoward issue of the first Punic
War, the Carthaginians gradually regained the ascendant in the
Peninsula, while his manners were so winning, that erelong he attracted
all its military strength to his standard. The Roman influence was
limited to the narrow and broken territory which lies between the Ebro
and the Pyrenees, and forms the modern province of Catalonia, while all
the rest of the Peninsula obeyed the orders of Hannibal. It was in Spain
that he formed that great military force which so soon after shook to
its foundation the solid fabric of Roman power; he there erected the
platform on which his engines of assault were placed. When he began his
triumphant march from Saguntum to attempt the conquest of Rome, after
surmounting both the Pyrenees and the Alps, he was at the head of a
splendid army of ninety thousand foot, and twelve thousand horse, with
forty elephants; the most powerful a